Timely Projects

“Fruitvale Station” and “Blue Jasmine.”

What is the value of a young black man’s life? That question should have been settled long ago—or never asked—but it remains enragingly alive, and it has been posed again, with uncanny timing and force, in the new independent film “Fruitvale Station.” The movie is based on a true story. On New Year’s Eve, 2008, Oscar Grant III, twenty-two years old, was out with friends in San Francisco. Going home to the East Bay on a BART train, a few hours after midnight, he got into a fight with a white thug who baited him. The police removed Grant and his friends from the train and detained them at the Fruitvale station in Oakland, where Grant, lying face down on the platform, was shot by a panicked BART cop. The officer later said that he reached for his Taser and pulled out his gun by mistake. Grant died the next morning; the policeman was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and served eleven months. In 2011, Ryan Coogler, a twenty-four-year-old African-American film student at the University of Southern California, approached the actor and producer Forest Whitaker with an idea for telling Oscar Grant’s story. Whitaker signed on immediately, and the movie was reportedly made for less than a million dollars. “Fruitvale Station” is a confident, touching, and, finally, shattering directorial début. Coogler begins with an actual cell-phone video of the killing taken by a bystander—a shaky and distant record in which we see Oscar and his friends lying on the platform, and the police, alarmed by the crowd cursing at them, trying to control the situation. We hear a shot; onlookers gasp. The rest of “Fruitvale Station” re-creates the last twenty-four hours of Grant’s life. The day surges toward the moment on the platform with an appalling finality.

Coogler uses Oscar’s cell-phone calls as a means of framing the different elements in his life. December 31st was a busy day, in which Oscar gives up selling marijuana (which has landed him in prison in the past); attempts to get back a job that he lost two weeks earlier; and buys food for his mother’s birthday party—a happy family gathering that takes place early in the evening. Michael B. Jordan (“The Wire,” “Friday Night Lights”), who plays Oscar, has a dazzling smile and an easy way about him—physically, Oscar glides through his life with complete assurance. He has an affectionate but difficult relationship with his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz), the mother of his young daughter, whom he adores. Sophina wants him to shape up. She’s not the only one. Oscar is charming and friendly, but there’s something lost and irresolute about him that drives the people who love him crazy. It’s hard for him to be straight with them: he delays telling Sophina and his tough-talking mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer), that he was fired. We can see from a prison sequence set in the past that he’s fearless and won’t let anyone push him around. Yet if he’s overprepared to fight for himself, he’s underprepared to earn a living and take care of a family. He’s an uncertain young man who is just possibly shifting, at the New Year, toward a steadier life.

Coogler is unafraid of emotion—Octavia Spencer, with her big round eyes and her commanding voice, anchors our angry response to the tragedy—but he hasn’t made a tearjerker. The scene at the station is a nightmare of confusion, and Coogler doesn’t make clear why the police detained only the young black men—apart from the implicit racial explanation. But he isn’t interested in settling scores or in issuing racial sermons, either. If anything, the movie offers a wistful hope of solidarity: Oscar, during his last day, has several pleasant encounters with whites. The tolerant, friendly atmosphere of the Bay Area is one reason that the finale is so heartbreaking. “Fruitvale Station” sums up Oscar’s life, but the act of summing up can tell us only so much, since a young life is still a maze of promise and indecision. From the evidence of this movie, Oscar Grant was smart and foolish, loving and irresponsible, candid and evasive, and now he’s another young black man gone.

Just to get the obvious out of the way: Woody Allen, in his startling new movie, “Blue Jasmine,” has adopted the basic framework of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The literal-minded will call the movie derivative; I think of it as a grateful homage, a brilliant contemporary variation. In place of Blanche DuBois, the ruined Southern belle who believes in art and gentleness and depends on the kindness of strangers, Allen has given us Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), a fallen Park Avenue woman who believes in luxury and status and depends on the kindness of wealthy men. For years, her husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), a high-finance eminence, spoiled her. But Hal turned out to be a swindler—a younger Bernie Madoff—who got caught and lost everything. As the movie opens, Jasmine, broke, her nerves shattered, arrives in San Francisco and moves in with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who works at a supermarket and lives with her two chubby and inarticulate little boys in a cramped apartment on South Van Ness. Accustomed to large, glamorous rooms, good food, and sophisticated—or, at least, affluent—company, Jasmine is offended by everything in Ginger’s working-class life. Jasmine is a snob and a liar, and, at times, delusional (she talks to herself), but, like Blanche DuBois, she’s mesmerizing. You can’t get enough of her, and Cate Blanchett, who played Blanche on Broadway only a few years ago, gives the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career. The actress, like her character, is out on a limb much of the time, but there’s humor in Blanchett’s work, and a touch of self-mockery as well as an eloquent sadness. When she drops her voice to its smoky lower register, we know that she’s teasing the tragic mode. That edge of self-parody keeps us close to her, and we need that closeness, because we’re in for a rough ride.

Allen, who’s now seventy-seven, has become flintier as he has got older. His men and women tell one another off; the social clashes among people from different ways of life can be harsh and unforgiving. Jasmine and Ginger are not biological sisters—both were adopted—and they regard each other as hostile strangers. Sally Hawkins, the pale, tiny, chattery British actress whose nervous smile has brightened films like “Happy-Go-Lucky,” dashes around San Francisco in shapeless print dresses that hang from a string around her neck. Her Ginger is innocent of taste but good-natured; she has to bear the brunt of Jasmine’s misery while fielding troubles of her own. She was married to a surly guy (Andrew Dice Clay), and she tossed him. Her boyfriend, an auto repairman named Chili (Bobby Cannavale), is nuts about her, and excitable to the point of hysteria. Much of this plays as farce, but the sting of suspicion and social loathing animates scene after scene: when Jasmine attacks the noisy, sweaty Chili as a loser, unworthy of Ginger, he fights back and tries to destroy her. Allen, in his own way, is commenting on our increasingly unequal society: the formerly rich woman and the working-class characters don’t begin to get one another’s jokes and references; they don’t understand one another’s needs—they don’t even see them.

Allen’s camera is more active in this film than in his earlier work. He moves with the characters when they’re quarrelling and stays with them in continuous shots as physical violence erupts. The movie is curt and decisive—a “late” style, if there ever was one. After beginning with Jasmine’s arrival in San Francisco, Allen moves forward in time, but when she hears a word that sets off a memory, Blanchett’s face hardens, her eyes narrow, and, with an abrupt flat cut, Allen takes us into her past life. In the Park Avenue apartment, or in the Hamptons, Blanchett has the exercised torso, the flawless skin of a modern goddess. Allen’s eye is amused—the English racing-green walls and equestrian paintings in the apartment are almost a caricature of Wasp refinement. His own tastes may be closer to Jasmine’s Upper East Side than to Ginger’s low-rent San Francisco, but he’s satirizing the way the rich cocoon themselves in luxury to ward off the rest of life—that is, until disaster strikes, and they are no longer protected.

The miracle is that we feel for Jasmine—or, at least, our responses to her are divided between laughter and sympathy. When she takes a job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, and the patients can’t decide when to schedule their next appointment, her irritation at their fumbling is both funny and recognizable. Jasmine flings herself at a Bay Area scion—an ambitious State Department official, played by Peter Sarsgaard—just because he has the right monied tone and wears his hair fashionably long in the back. As their affair begins, her relief is palpable; she glows again, if only for a moment. “Blue Jasmine” may be derived from Williams, but Allen has merged Williams’s fable with the reality of 2013. Jasmine’s economic slide, to one extent or another, has been experienced by millions of Americans. In all, this is the strongest, most resonant movie Woody Allen has made in years. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.